Corpo visível e invisível na formação do professor de língua inglesa na educação a distância: um estudo discursivo

Abstract

This study addresses how the body is stated in the writings of the participants in an undergraduate course of English Language and English Literature, at a distance, offered by a public university from the Southeast region of Brazil, between the years of 2011 to 2015. It is a course of the Open University of Brazil. The course was created as a response to the demand of university formation of teachers already in service in the Public Elementary Education, but it also attended students from social demand. For the majority of the students, this was the first University-level course taken, the first experience with distance learning and the first time studying English as a foreign language after mid an higher education. In the course, like in others of the same format, a great part of the activities happened thru writing. From the position of tutor in the course, this researcher observed that the students seemed to have difficulties to learn English, as they expressed it could be caused by the modality of the course and by the absence of presential bodies of the tutors and professors in the space of the virtual classroom, as it happens in the situation of face-to-face courses. When we observed the texts of these students and also of the tutors, it was possible to understand that the writing materialized a little of the bodies of its enunciators, like marks in the linguistic surface. Thus the objective of this study is to: (1) analyze how the body makes itself visible in the virtual environment of the course, in the written material of students and tutors, and (2) investigate how the absence of the body as materially visible was signified for the learning of the English language. We start from the assumption that, as in the traditional presential classroom, the participants need to make themselves visible and accessible so there is interaction for the teaching and the learning of the foreign language to take place. Our corpus of analysis comprises written texts from students in activities of different subjects in the course and responses to a questionnaire. The theoretical foundation is based in the French Discourse Analysis as practiced in Brazil and in Applied Linguistics. We try to answer the following questions of research: How did the participants occupy the space in the virtual classroom as written materials? How did they become visible? Did the lack of the visible, presential body of the tutors and professors constitute a difficulty to learn English? This is a qualitative research with an interpretative-descriptive focus. It aims to make visible the discursive regularities in the corpus of analysis for an understanding of the discursive webs at play. As a result, we found out that the participants occupied the virtual space as corporality (HASHIGUTI, 2015a), that is, as bodies materialized in their writing, more specifically, as bodies of affection. This discursive practice functioned as a fundamental way for the constitution of the meanings of collaboration, companionship and engagement that enabled the students to stay in the course and to face the difficulties. We concluded that the orality difficulty was not an effect of the modality, but of the English Language itself as a foreign language. The main difficulty of the students was to adjust to the modality of the course. We concluded that body as affection, and body and affection as written text have constituted fundamental materialities and conditions of human interrelation in the virtual learning environment to help overcome this difficulty.